Bob Dylan by Clinton Heylin A Life in Stolen Moments Day by Day 1941-1995

Influential, enigmatic, outspoken, ever-changing . . . these are just a few of the many words used to describe America's greatest songwriter, Bob Dylan. No one has been more prolific more honored, and more revered in his lifetime; no one has inspired such devoted fans who hang on his every changing word and many changing moods. Dylan's appeal spans aging baby boomers through today's grunge rockers, as his successful appearances on 'MTV Unplugged' and at Woodstock II testified.

The New York Times

Later on, though, his account of how Dylan used a ballad by the 1920s crooner Gene Austin as the basis for his song “Sugar Baby,” presented here as an instance of what I took to be Yaffe’s original reporting, turns out to have been laid out in greater detail by the Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin...

The Guardian

A Life of Bob Dylan
Howard Sounes
Doubleday £17.99, pp527
Buy it at a discount at BOL
Bob Dylan, Behind the Shades: Take Two
Clinton Heylin
Penguin £9.99, pp780
Buy it at a discount at BOL
With the imminent sixtieth birthday of rock's poet laureate about to unloose a train of tributes and retro...

Publishers Weekly

In this update to his 1991 tome, based on unpublished manuscripts such as the diaries from Dylan's 1974 tour and the Blood on the Tracks recording sessions, which were unavailable 10 years ago, along with new, original interviews, Heylin documents ""a constant, unresolvable conflict between man a...

BC Books

Perhaps it’s difficult if not impossible for Dylan to escape his roots as he manages to slip a line of war protest into “Tweeter and the Monkey Man.” “Tweeter was a Boy Scout ‘fore she went to Viet Nam, and found out the hard way, nobody gives a damn.”
Anyone with an interest in Dylan, his lyr...

BC Books

Still On The Road: The Songs of Bob Dylan, 1974 - 2006 is the second of Heylin’s works that deal specifically with the Dylan canon and the fifth of his more than 20 books dealing with Dylan in some shape or form.

The New York Review of Books

In the introduction to his new book, Marcus recalls seeing Dylan perform for the first time in the summer of 1963, “in a field in New Jersey.” Among the songs Dylan played was “With God on Our Side,” which opens:
Oh my name it is nothin’
My age it means less Dylan, Marcus writes, did seem agele...